The great thing about animation is that you can let your imagination run completely wild. Your characters can be anything, do anything and go anywhere...all for no extra production cost. Most of the time animation is limited to the adventures of cuddly animals or, as seen in recent years, riffs on the superhero genre. But sometimes animation is left to run wild and the results can be spectacular. The french production A Town Called Panic is such an example. Shot in stop motion with a bastard combination of plastic children's toys and plasticine Aardman-esque characters if follows the everyday lives of folk in a small village. Sounding like the set up for a kids joke, the film focuses on a Horse, a Cowboy and an Indian (native American) who live in a farm house together. When the childlike Cowboy and Indian decide to order some bricks, in order to build a barbecue for Horse's birthday, a simple error causes dramatic consequences.
The film is batshit crazy, like a freakish mutant offspring of Robot Chicken and Mr Tourettes from Modern Toss. The silly French characters are, of course, subtitled which adds to the outlandishness of the story. The animation is crude and jerky, which adds to the charm and the frenzied lunacy of the film. It's a globe-trotting adventure with mad scientists, an equine romance, musical farmyard beasts, undersea aliens and physics defying stunts.
You may find this far too absurd and crazy, wanting to kick the TV in with disbelief and confusion. But if you can go with it you'll see a film like you've never seen before. Like the cocaine fueled nightmare of Toy Story's Woody, A Town Called Panic will keep you entertained and on a dizzy high when it's all over.
No comments:
Post a Comment